Jack Saturday

Monday, November 24, 2014

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1222-1224

Obviously, we can't make things naturally in unnatural surroundings. We can't do things properly unless we are properly fed and properly housed. We must also be properly equipped with the necessary tools, and then left alone to get on with the job.Herbert ReadTo Hell With Culture

The moral equality of men [sic] is an a priori assumption which cannot be affected by variations in their capacity to make themselves useful in the processes of economic production. A society truly committed to recognizing such equality would not discriminate against the unemployed, or unskilled, or persons deemed to have a low IQ, since IQ is itself a measure of a set of attributes that derive their utility from the demands of industrial society.Edgar Z. Friedenberg.The Disposal Of Liberty And Other Industrial Wastes

Edgar Rice Burroughs' extraordinary fantasy Tarzan Of The Apes, which appeared first in 1912. Something in the neighbourhood of fifty million copies of these books - there are several of them - have been sold, in sixty languages. They are fantasy-books; their author was a man who was a failure in business, and wrote - in the beginning - to give rein to his stifled imagination.Robertson DaviesThunder Without Rain[emphasis JS]

Monday, November 17, 2014

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1219-1221

And suppose, to elaborate the nightmare, that we had decided even as late as 1950 to grant a proper stewardship and husbandry to the natural world. Suppose we had refused to countenance the industrialization of everything from agriculture to medicine to education to religion. Suppose we had not tolerated the transformation, in the official and then the public mind, of vocation to "a job," which is to say the transformation of the farmer, the tradesman, even the sharecropper (all subsistence-based) to an "employee" helplessly dependent on an employer and "the economy" and interchangeable with any other employee. Suppose we had not stood for the displacement of people who once functioned as parts of the creaturely world, working members of their places - the quality of their work always, of course, in question - to the "labor pool" and the placelessness of modern life.Nothing living lives aloneWendell Berryfrom the Threepenny ReviewPushcart Prize XXXVIIBest Of The Small Presses

Whoever gives his [sic] labor for money sells himself and puts himself in the rank of slaves.Cicero

...The only thing "free" about so-called "free time" is that it doesn't cost the boss anything. Free time is mostly devoted to getting ready for work, going to work, returning from work, and recovering from work. Free time is a euphemism for the peculiar way labor as a factor of production not only transports itself at its own expense to and from the workplace but assumes primary responsibility for its own maintenance and repair. Coal and steel don't do that. Lathes and laptops don't do that. But workers do. No wonder Edward. G. Robinson in one of his gangster movies exclaimed, "Work is for saps!"

Monday, November 10, 2014

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1216-1218

CEOs, upper management, and financial professionals made up about 60 percent of the richest 1% of Americans in 2005. Only 3 percent were entrepreneurs. A recent study found that less than 1 percent of all entrepreneurs came from very rich or very poor backgrounds.The biggest investment by corporations is overseas, where they keep 57 percent of their cash and fill their factories with low-wage workers.

Commerce Department figures show that U.S. companies cut their work forces by 2.9 million from 2000 to 2009 while increasing overseas employment by 2.4 million.

In fact, the very rich may not care about U.S. jobs in any form. Surveys reveal that 60 percent of investors worth $25 million or more are investing up to a third of their total assets overseas. Back home, the extra wealth created by the Bush tax cuts led to "worst track record" for jobs in recorded history. How the "Job Creators" REALLY Spend Their MoneybyPaul BuchheitCommonDreams[emphasis JS]

Speaking to a House of Commons committee, Poloz suggested young Canadians and others struggling to find work should acquire more experience through unpaid internships or volunteering until the country's hobbled job market picks up.
..."If your parents are letting you live in the basement, you might as well go out and do something for free to put the experience on your CV."
...

The controversial issue of unpaid internships has been under scrutiny since Andrew Ferguson, a student in Alberta who was interning at a radio station, died in 2011 while driving home after a 16-hour day.
...
Statistics Canada's latest job numbers said the unemployment rate for people aged 15 to 24 was 13.5 per cent in September, almost double the country's overall jobless rate of 6.8 per cent for the same month.Bank of Canada governor draws fire for suggesting students should work for free to get experienceThe Canadian Press Posted: Nov 05, 2014[emphasis JS]

[...] in industry after industry, speedups are turning work into a hazard, with increasing numbers of injuries and dangerous levels of stress. While 18.6 million people remain underemployed, millions of others are working more hours, and more intensely, than ever. This is especially true in certain industries, from oil refineries to retail to publishing, where federal data shows labor productivity has risen at double or more the national rate. A 2010 survey of people registered with Monster.com found that 53 percent of respondents had taken on additional duties since the start of the recession because co-workers had been laid off—almost all of them without any additional compensation. A 2010 report from the Center for American Progress and the Hastings Center for WorkLife Law found that overwork was a particular problem among professionals: 14 percent of women and 38 percent of men were working more than fifty hours a week. But it has become common in industrial occupations as well.
...
Since they couldn’t keep up with the line when someone took a bathroom break, supervisors responded by simply denying break requests. “There are people who would pee in their pants,” he told me, “because they didn’t give them permission to go.”
...
Everyone talked about popping enormous doses of Tylenol; some talked about pressure so intense it left them depressed. “The Speed Kills You,” a 2009 report from the nonprofit organization Nebraska Appleseed, was based on a survey of 455 meatpacking workers; it cataloged a range of injuries, from cuts, falls and fractures to musculoskeletal and repetitive-strain injuries, attributed mainly to “uninterrupted line speed.”
...
The BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 was caused, in part, by intense production pressures that had entire crews working twelve-hour shifts without a single day off for weeks on end...
...
“There are so many nurses on Xanax, Ativan or antidepressants” ...Americans Are Working So Hard It’s Actually Killing PeopleBy Esther KaplanThe Nation [emphasis JS]

Monday, November 03, 2014

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1213-1215

Do you feel like you are living? I mean really living? That big fat life that you’re grabbing with both hands whilst shouting ‘hell yeah’ — running alongside every challenge that comes your way? Or do you feel like you’re drifting? Ambling along in a fug of the daily grind? Getting up each morning feeling like you are simply existing day-to-day?

If you are the former, then high fives my friend, you’re amongst those lucky people who have it all figured out, and if you don’t, then it’s likely that you’re just enjoying the ride anyway. If you are in the latter camp then you, like a helluva a lot of people out there, may not be living the life you feel you really should be. Am I right in thinking that this feels pretty damn shitty most days? Nothing seems to go as it should do, and life generally feels like an uphill struggle most of the time. I just want you to know before we go on, that you are not alone.

Let us meet the new era of abundance with self-chosen work and freedom to follow the dream of one's own heart.Ivan Illich,Call To Celebration

From the merged vantage point of somebodies who know they are equally nobodies, domination and servility are repellant, insupportable and, like slavery, destined to become one of the embarrassments of the human story.Robert W. FullerSomebodies And Nobodies

About

About Me

Come by to Jack Saturday once a week for some bracing anti-wage-slavery quotations, it'll be nice to have you over to the place. I'll be including some of the wake of my personal journey through freedom from the job in this third emancipatory phase of history, the phase of liberation of wage-slaves through a Guaranteed Livable Income.
..............................
Come to Extraordinary Discourse for my podcast, wider ranging. It would be a joy to spend an hour a week with you.